In Memoriam

In an effort to share news with the AAPOR membership, contact AAPOR Headquarters if you have information about the passing of an AAPOR member or other significant member of the public opinion and survey research community.

2017

Reuben Cohen

Reuben Cohen, 95, died on July 23, 2017. A longtime Princeton resident, Reuben was a founder and former president of the research firm, Response Analysis Corporation, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (1978-1979), and a past president of the Jewish Center of Princeton.

Reuben deserves credit for convincing Executive Council to allow a New York chapter (NYAAPOR). Until then, many in AAPOR had opposed a New York chapter for fear that it might supplant the national organization.

A private man, known for his integrity and keen intellect, Reuben cared deeply about social justice and donated generously to progressive causes. Reuben was born on Nov. 26, 1921, in Washington, DC, where one of his first jobs was as a paperboy hawking newspapers at FDR's inauguration. He received his BS and MA from American University. His studies were interrupted while serving in the US Army in World War II, followed by a civilian post at the Pentagon. In 1956, Reuben moved to Princeton to accept a position at Opinion Research Corporation. He later co-founded Response Analysis Corporation.

Well recognized in his field, Reuben was called to testify before Congress as an expert in statistical sampling techniques. After retiring in 1986, Reuben spent time traveling, creating a Japanese garden, and cheering for the Washington Redskins.

She was a research professor emerita at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, which is part of its Institute for Social Research (ISR). She had a long and distinguished career at the University of Michigan, at Columbia University, and elsewhere.

Eleanor was very active in the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). She was AAPOR president from 1987-88, and also served as conference chair, standards chair, and twice as counselor-at-large. In 1996, she received the AAPOR Award for Lifetime Achievement.

“Eleanor was a major figure in the field of survey methodology and she will be greatly missed by all who knew her,” said ISR Director David Lam. “We are fortunate that she spent the last decades of her illustrious career at ISR, where she made major contributions to research, training, and the intellectual life of the Institute.” Eleanor joined ISR in 1994.

Among her many accomplishments was her ten-year tenure as editor of Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ), in which she elevated survey methodology as an academic discipline, according to University of Michigan political scientist and past AAPOR president Michael Traugott. “Eleanor was editor of Public Opinion Quarterly at a time when survey research and public opinion research became established in the university setting,” said Traugott. “By her selection of content and manuscripts, she — in a very important but subtle way — promoted and encouraged the study of academic survey methods…”

Stanley Presser, another past president of AAPOR, who also edited POQ, had this to say about Eleanor: “For nearly half a century, Eleanor Singer had a profound influence on both AAPOR (no one comes close to her tenure as POQ editor) and research on public opinion and survey methods more generally. She worked on big problems in rigorous and imaginative ways and found joy in doing so – joy that she shared with 74 co-authors. She leaves us a rich legacy.”

According to another past AAPOR president, Bob Groves, “Eleanor was one of those productive scientists who was also an incredible magnet for collaboration. She ended up collaborating with half of the people in the building, was known as a wonderful mentor, and an exquisite writer. Whenever I would get back articles I submitted to her that she had rewritten, I realized she made my pieces better. As a collaborator you would discover that again and again.”

In 2016, she received the Monroe G. Sirken Award in Interdisciplinary Survey Methods Research for “significant contributions in our understanding of survey participation, sources of nonresponse bias, and factors affecting survey responses; for pioneering research on the use and effects of incentives; and for leadership in developing awareness and understanding of ethical issues in survey research.”

Her work continues to play an important role in the study of survey methodology.

Singer was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930. When she was 8 years old, her family fled the rise of Nazi Germany in Europe and settled in Astoria, New York. She completed a B.A. in English at Queens College in 1951, where she met her late husband Alan Singer. In her early career, Singer worked as a book editor at various publishing houses, and increasingly specialized in books about social science. She remained a superb editor throughout her career.

In 1959, Eleanor decided to pursue graduate school at Columbia University. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1966. There, she met and worked with illustrious mentors including Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, and her dissertation sponsor Herbert H. Hyman, who introduced her to public opinion research and survey methodology. She went on to conduct research at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

In 2011, Eleanor, along with five co-authors of the textbook Survey Methodology, donated an estimated $60,000 in royalties to benefit graduate student education and research in survey methodology at ISR.

Eleanor touched my own career in a number of ways. She was the editor of POQ who accepted my first methodological paper. We went on to collaborate on six papers and a book. I agree with Bob Groves that she was a superb writer and with Stanley Presser that no one came close to her as an editor. Bad prose went in and good prose came out.

Eleanor described herself as a contrarian and I can attest that she could sometimes be prickly, but these qualities made her abundant warmth and kindness all the sweeter. I’m one of the many people who will miss her sorely.

Mary Ellen Colten, long-time director of the Center for Survey Research at UMass Boston, died on May 2, 2017, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts after an extended struggle with cancer.

Mary Ellen received her PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan and also held graduate degrees from Yale University and Simmons College. In 1982, Mary Ellen left the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan to become a study director at the Center for Survey Research (CSR) at UMass Boston. Although her interests and expertise covered a wide variety of areas related to survey research and its methods, common research themes were mental health, women’s issues, and environmental hazards. Her most ambitious and important research project, co-led with Professor Susan Gore in the Department of Sociology at UMass Boston, was a decade-long longitudinal study of teens from three Boston area high schools, who were followed into their young adult years, to better understand the correlates of their stresses and other mental health outcomes.

In 1989, she became director of CSR and served in that position until her retirement in 2014. She embraced her role as director with much enthusiasm and passion. In the 25 years under her leadership, the center’s funding, research portfolio, and national reputation grew and thrived.

Mary Ellen will be dearly missed by her colleagues at CSR, not only for her knowledge, energy, and dedication, but also for her care and concern for those with whom she worked.

Jack Elinson

Jack Elinson, died on February 13, 2017. Dr. Jack Elinson was the founder of Columbia University’s Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, the first such department in a public health school in the country. He was a pioneer in the field of sociomedical science, which incorporates sociology, anthropology, economics, history, political science, social psychology, and philosophy into the study of health and medicine. He is especially noted for looking at health through a different lens, measuring the “quality of life,” by the “5 Ds”: dissatisfaction, discomfort, disability, disease and death.

Dr. Elinson was born Israel Jacob in 1917 at home (“because I wanted to be close to my mother,” he often quipped) in the Bronx. His parents immigrated from Russia; his father, Zusha, was a paper hanger and his mother, the former Rebecca Block, died when he was six-years-old.

He grew up in the Bronx, Harlem and Richmond Hill, Queens, raised by his father, his older sister Annie and his paternal grandparents. He attended Boys’ High in Brooklyn (riding the subway two hours each way from the last stop on the IND Lefferts Boulevard subway line) and graduated from City College of New York with a degree in chemistry and psychology at the age of 20 in 1937.

During World War II, he served as a social science analyst in the War Department in Washington, D.C. and in the South Pacific, working with leading sociologists including Sam Stouffer, Leonard Cottrell, Shirley Star, Robin Williams, and Louis Guttman, researching morale and attitudes of U.S. GIs. Their work was later compiled in the groundbreaking volume The American Soldier. He received his Masters degree from George Washington University in 1946, and his PhD in Social Psychology from George Washington University in 1954.

During his time at the War Department, he met May Gomberg, who had come from Chicago to work in the Department of Labor Statistics, as part of the war effort. They married in 1941.

Dr. Elinson was a passionate advocate for racial equality and relished meeting international visitors at conferences focusing on social inequities and the new field of sociomedical sciences. These ideas were not well accepted at his workplace – the War Department, which was then located in the Pentagon. In 1950, Elinson was targeted by the Army-McCarthy hearings and questioned about his “unduly fraternizing with colored persons,” his visits to the Washington Bookstore where left-wing books were sold, and why he allowed his younger sister Marcelle to date a man from the “Communist-led Seaman’s Union.” Though many friends and colleagues, including military officers, testified on his behalf, the threatening atmosphere was deemed perilous by the couple, who now had four small children under the age of six.

So when Elinson was offered a position at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago, they picked up their lives and moved to May’s hometown. In addition to his work at NORC, Dr. Elinson, he also was an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Chicago from 1954 to 1956.

One of the projects he worked on at NORC was a landmark study with Dr. Ray Trussell, Chronic Illness in a Rural Area, which demonstrated much higher rates of chronic disease among a rural population in New Jersey than were reported in personal interviews. The pioneering study was the first to include both on-site clinical examinations along with questionnaires in a probability study of the general population to collect valuable health data. Following that study, when Dr. Trussell became Dean of the Columbia School of Public Health in 1956, he recruited Dr. Elinson to Columbia, and the family relocated to Teaneck, New Jersey.

When Dr. Elinson joined the faculty of the School of Public Health (then part of Columbia’s Medical School), there was no role for a social scientist in the field and no social scientist on the faculty of the school. He asked the librarian to order books that reflected social science disciplines, including work by Michael Harrington, Oscar Lewis, and Thorsten Veblen. The librarian refused his request, claiming that those works had nothing to do with medicine. Elinson recalled that he had to get the “downtown” – liberal arts – campus library to stock them for his students.

In 1968, he founded the Department of Sociomedical Sciences (which began as a division) and headed the department from 1968 to 1978, and again from1982 to 1985. Elinson's research focused on assessing and addressing unmet needs for health care, and evaluating the effectiveness of health services. He and his collaborators carried out health surveys in Washington Heights and Puerto Rico, opinion surveys of mental health issues, studies of multiphasic automated testing for health, and drug use surveys of teenagers. He also directed the innovative Harlem Hospital Center Patient Care and Program Evaluation department from 1966 to 1971.

In the more than half a century that he served at Columbia as professor, department chair, and mentor, Dr. Elinson was recognized as a leader in the development of public health as a sociomedical science. He is acclaimed for bringing a new understanding of health measures. Instead of focusing on a medical model, he created the paradigm of the Five Ds: death, disease, disability, discomfort and dissatisfaction. This model is now widely used in assessing quality of life.

Elinson explained, “Social determinants such as socioeconomic status, the neighborhood you live in, the kind of family relations you have, the social networks which you exist in all contribute to people’s health or ill health. If you want to look at these questions, the way to study that is to use sociomedical science, which includes all the social sciences bearing on health questions.”

Dr. Elinson was deeply committed to improving health care delivery in developing countries, particularly Latin America. He helped establish the School of Public Health at the University of Puerto Rico, and led several studies there including an island-wide household survey of 3,000 families examining medical care use, and a report on the career attitudes of doctors and nurses, published in 1962 as Medical and Hospital Care in Puerto Rico. He served as a consultant with the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) and designed and analyzed public health programs in the Dominican Republic, Argentina and Cuba.

When he retired from Columbia in 1986, Dr. Elinson was granted emeritus status and continued to teach classes and mentor students. He also was appointed distinguished visiting professor at the Rutgers University Institute of Health Care Policy. He is the author, co-author and editor of numerous books and wrote approximately one hundred articles, book chapters, and government reports. In addition to those cited above, his books include Community Fact Book for Washington Heights, New York City (1963), Public Image of Mental Health Services (1967, with Elena Padilla and Marvin E. Perkins), Ethnic and Educational Data on Adults in New York City (1967, with Paul Haberman and Cyrille Gell), and SocioMedical Health Indicators (1979 with Athilia E. Siegmann). His papers are preserved in the Archives and Special Collections of the Columbia University Health Sciences Library. He is also the subject of an award-winning documentary, “Jack Elinson: Pioneer in the Sociomedical Sciences.”

An engaging and witty speaker, Dr. Elinson spoke at public health conferences around the world. He attended the first meeting of the American Association of Public Opinion Research in 1946, and served as its president in 1979-80. He was a fellow of the American Sociological Association, and received its Leo Reeder Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology in 1985. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, he also served on the board of the Medical and Health Research Association of New York City and the Bergen County New Jersey Tuberculosis and Health Association. He was honored with a National Merit Award from the Delta Omega Society (the honorary society in the field of public health) and a Festschrift (special tribute issue) of Social Science and Medicine in 1989. Columbia University grants the Jack Elinson Award to a graduate student who is the author of the best published paper in sociomedical sciences.

An amateur photographer and polyglot, Elinson spoke Spanish, German and Yiddish, and enjoyed singing in all three. Even into his nineties, he enjoyed regaling his family with a full-throated version of the Internationale in Yiddish. He traveled widely, and delighted in showing off his hometown of New York City to international visitors. They were enthralled with his intriguing stories about city spots that were off the beaten tracks, from the best pickle shop on the Lower East Side to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where as a teenager he had cut class to listen to the likes of Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Bessie Smith.

He would often combine his professional research with travel adventures for his family. Together, they piled into a station wagon and crossed the country to California, Mexico, and back to their grandparents’ home in Chicago, car camping and stopping at numerous historic sites, museums and national parks. When working in Puerto Rico, he took each of the four children with him over school vacations, introducing them to the Spanish language, the island culture, and his public health colleagues.

He was predeceased by his wife May, a clinical nutritionist at the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, who died in 2010. He is survived by his four children: Richard (Lynn) of Huntington, New York, Elaine (Rene CiriaCruz) of San Francisco, California, Mitchell (Sande) of Roosevelt Island, New York and Robert (Cecelia) of Hillsdale, New York; seven grandchildren: Alex, Sara, Morgan, Blake, Matthew, Zusha and Sarah; and five great-grandchildren: Max, Zane, Keira, Mace and Stella Mae. The family wishes to express deep gratitude to William Amponseh who cared for Dr. Elinson in his later years.

Today, all major schools of public health in the United States teach sociomedical sciences. Former students of Dr. Elinson have continued his pioneering work on the impact of race and poverty on health at universities and health care agencies around the world.

At Columbia, where a medical librarian first refused to purchase sociology books for the graduate students in public health, there is now a collection entitled the Jack Elinson Sociomedical Sciences Library..

2016

James A. Davis

James A. Davis was born in Chicago in 1929 and died on September 29, 2016 in hospice at Saint Anthony Hospital in Michigan City, Indiana, surrounded by his family.

Davis was a distinguished American sociologist, best known as a pioneer in the application of quantitative statistical methods to social science. Among his early-career works were “The Campus as Frog Pond” which asserted that career decisions of college men were shaped by “relative deprivation,” their relative standing vis-à-vis peers, and numerous studies of the social psychology and structure of small groups. Davis’s most enduring impact on social science was his development of the General Social Survey (GSS) project, which has tracked trends in the social and political attitudes and behaviors of U.S. adults since 1972. He was a leader in advocating for wide and timely dissemination of social science data, insisting that the GSS be made available immediately to scholars, policy makers, and students. His own GSS-based studies documented steady trends toward greater tolerance and liberal attitudes, much of this a result of the gradual replacement of more conservative older cohorts by more liberal younger generations. Davis later co-founded the International Social Survey Program, which conducts comparative survey research across dozens of countries. Among his books were Great Books and Small Groups (1961), Elementary Survey Analysis (1971), The Logic of Causal Order(1985), and Social Differences in Contemporary America (1987).

After receiving his doctorate from Harvard University in Sociology in 1955, Davis taught at Yale University, the University of Chicago, the Johns Hopkins University, Dartmouth College, and finally Harvard University, where he served as chair of the sociology department in the 1980s and served, with his wife Martha Davis, as Co-Master of Winthrop House. A devoted and witty undergraduate teacher, Davis was quick to recognize the potential classroom uses of computers, and was an early promoter of what is now called “active learning”. He conducted his classes as laboratories in which students developed and then tested hypotheses in real time using data from the GSS and other surveys, and developed software for the in-class analysis of survey data beginning in the 1970s. His course “American Society” was a perennial favorite among Harvard undergraduates.

Davis was associated with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago beginning in 1957 and continuing throughout his career; he served as its Director from 1971 to 1975. After retiring from Harvard in the 1990s, he lived in Chicago and Lakeside, Michigan; and continued to teach as a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Davis received his B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1950 and his M.S. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1952. He was recognized with many professional honors, including the Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research, from the Roper Center (2010), the Warren E. Miller Award for Meritorious Services to the Social Sciences from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (1997), the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from Harvard (1997), the American Association for Public Opinion Research Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement (1992), and the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award from the American Sociological Association (1989).

Helen Martha Crossley, 95, of Princeton, N.J., died on September 25, 2016.

Exceptionally bright and intellectually curious, Helen devoted her life to developing and improving techniques in public opinion research. She was a founding member of both the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), and served as WAPOR's first female president from 1960-62. Through a philanthropic gift in 2012, she established the Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

In tribute, the late George Gallup Jr. said of her: "Helen has always retained a fascination with research methodology, and also with the potential of survey research to make new discoveries about humankind, and to bring about positive change in societies around the world."

Immediately following her graduation from Radcliffe College, Helen went to Washington, D.C., to work for the Office of War Information and the War Food Administration during World War II. She earned a master's degree in 1948 from the University of Denver' Opinion Research Center, working under mentor Don Cahalan.

In the early 1950s, Helen worked in Germany for the Armed Forces Information and Education Division, ending as chief of its research branch. In 1955 she began her long association with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), working with Leo P. Crespi to establish coordinated research surveys in many countries of Europe, Asia and Latin America. These surveys measured foreign publics' awareness of attitudes toward U.S. policies and culture, and were in effect the "Ear of America."

Following a two-year evaluation assignment with the aid program in South Korea from 1960-62, Helen became a freelance consultant, serving academic, commercial and government clients. She also worked for her father's firm, ArchCross Associates, and collaborated (through Political Surveys and Analyses Inc.) on several surveys for Governor Nelson Rockefeller and other political figures.

In 1979 she returned to USIA where she was instrumental in arranging for USIA survey data to be released for public use via the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and the National Archives. She retired in 1992 with the Agency's Career Achievement Award. After her retirement, she took up full-time residence in Princeton and spent several years cataloguing her father's papers, which she donated to the Roper Center.

Extraordinarily thoughtful and generous, Helen had an impact on individuals and institutions that will live on after her death. In addition to her charitable gift establishing the Crossley Center at the University of Denver, she was a major benefactor in the restoration of the historic White Hill Mansion in Fieldsboro, N.J., her father's birthplace.

Herbert E. Krugman died peacefully at his home in Stamford, CT on July 30, 2016. He served as president of AAPOR from 1964-1965 and received the AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement in 1990. Combining survey techniques with his background in cognitive and physiological psychology, Herb was the leading theorist of his generation on how consumers react to advertising. After a period in research positions in advertising and marketing, he became manager of public opinion research for the General Electric Company, from which he retired in 1984. He was a president of the Division of Consumer Psychology of the American Psychological Association and the Market Research Council of New York; he served on the faculties of Yale, Princeton, and Columbia Universities; and he was a trustee of the Marketing Science Institute and a director of the Advertising Research Foundation.

Stephen I. FrankStephen I. Frank died after complications of surgery on Wednesday, June 22, 2016. He will be remembered for his many professional accomplishments. However, for those that knew him best it was clear that his love and devotion for his wife Barb and son Thomas were most important to him. For many years there was a florist who would sell cut flowers and potted plants in the Atwood Center on Wednesdays. Every single Wednesday you could count on seeing Steve coming into the department after lunch with a bouquet to take home to Barb.

Steve will also be remembered for his devotion to St. Cloud State University, his students, the profession, and the community. Steve began his career as Ford Fellow high school teacher before pursuing a career in higher education, and always prided himself on being an energetic and innovative teacher. He served SCSU for 38 years before his retirement at the end of this academic year.

Among Steve’s many achievements was the founding of the SCSU Survey in 1980. He built it from a small class project for his undergrad research methods class into a nationally-recognized survey operation that Nate Silver rated as the third most-accurate poll of its size in 2012. In recognition of his body of work, in 2013 Steve was awarded the inaugural Distinguished Political Scientist Award by the Minnesota Political Science Association.

Steve’s commitment to the success of his students and to the university extended into all areas of his work. Steve served as chair of the SCSU Department of Political Science, president of the SCSU Faculty Association, and president of the Minnesota Political Science Association.

Steve also served as an instructor in the University of Minnesota Duluth Masters Program in Advocacy & Political Leadership. In addition, he was also active in the larger community and served as a council person for the city of St. Joseph from 2008-2015.

Allan L. McCutcheonAllan L. McCutcheon, emeritus distinguished professor statistics, survey research and methodology, and founder of the Gallup Research Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, died on May 3, 2016.Allan was a social statistician with a particular focus on categorical data models, classification analysis, cross-national and survey research.

As a longtime member of AAPOR, Allan served in several capacities including: Chair, Janet A. Harkness Student Paper Award Committee (2012-2016); Secretary/Treasurer (2003-04); Associate Secretary/Treasurer (2002-03); Chair, Education Committee (2002-04). Additionally, Allan served in many roles within WAPOR and MAPOR throughout his career.

Allan received many distinguished awards over the years including: American Statistical Association Fellow 2004, Royal Statistical Society Fellow 2007 and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars Fulbright Senior Scholar 1995-96 award to do research at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

Gladys Engel LangGladys Engel Lang, professor emerita of communication, sociology, and political science at the University of Washington, died on March 24, 2016. She was 96 years old.

A sociologist by training, and a researcher for the Offices of War Information (OWI) and Strategic Services (OSS), Gladys was a lifelong scholar of public opinion and political communication. Her work in this domain began with her doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, which examined television coverage of the 1952 Democratic and Republican conventions. Her focus on media effects, particularly those of television, can be seen in scores of studies ranging from Watergate to the effects of polls on public opinion and political behavior.

With her life and intellectual partner Kurt Lang, Gladys was a fixture at the key public opinion, communication, political science, and sociology meetings. The architects of the now-classic MacArthur Day study and authors of "Etched in Memory," an expansive undertaking of how some artists' reputations survive while others do not, Gladys and Kurt had reputations that preceded them. Their decades of research illustrated the benefits of using multiple methodologies, and showed exactly how media coverage could exert immediate, long-term, and ancillary effects - not only on individuals and social systems, but also on news practices and policy outcomes.

In his introduction to AAPOR's "A Meeting Place," Paul Sheatsley described the Langs as "the very surprised, but delighted, winners of the [1989] AAPOR Award." The two also received the 1994 Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award of the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association.

William “Bill” L. Nicholls IIWilliam “Bill” L. Nicholls II, who played a key role in implementing computer-assisted interviewing (CAI) at the U.S Bureau of the Census, died in Alexandria, Virginia, on March 23, 2016, after a brief illness. He was 85.

Bill was born July 1, 1930, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He graduated from Bucknell University with a B.A. in mathematics and sociology. He also attended Columbia University as a graduate student in the Department of Sociology. After completing his education, he worked at the University of California at Berkeley for over 20 years, starting as a lecturer in sociology in 1959 and then joining the university’s Survey Research Center as Assistant Director and Executive Director.

In 1980, he moved to Alexandria when he was hired by the U.S. Bureau of the Census as Director of the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) Project. For his accomplishments in the automation of survey data collection, he was awarded the Department of Commerce Silver Medal in 1994 and the Bureau of the Census Bronze Medal in 1986. He remained involved in CATI until he retired in 1997. He later served as a contractor for the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Throughout his career, Bill authored and co-authored more than 60 articles and collections on CATI. He also presented papers and attended meetings as a lecturer or contributor at conferences in the U.S. and around the world. In addition, he founded, organized or chaired conferences for the U.S. Bureau of the Census and professional organizations.

2015

Andrew KohutAndrew Kohut, president of AAPOR 1994-1995, died September 8 in Baltimore.

Andrew Kohut was a luminary in the field of public opinion research. In 2005, he received AAPOR’s highest honor, the Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement.

Andrew was the founding director of the Pew Research Center, served as president of the Pew Center from 2004 until 2012 and directed the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press from 1993 to 2012. During that time the Pew Research Center established a broad agenda of research aimed at informing the national dialogue and has become a dominant information resource for the public, media, and policy makers on how the public views issues and trends shaping America and the world. The Pew Research Center and the name Andrew Kohut have become synonymous with quality research, and Kohut’s writings and frequent appearances on news programs confirm his broad understanding of the public and ability to disentangle and communicate the sometimes difficult messages embedded in survey data.

Kohut was trained in polling under George Gallup and Paul Perry, two pioneers of modern political surveys and went on to become president of the Gallup Organization from 1979 to 1989. From 1990 to 1995 he directed the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, the forerunner of the Pew Research Center, where he authored the widely read report, “The Age of Indifference: A Study of Young American and How They View the News”, based on a comprehensive research of the Roper Center’s archives for historical data on news consumption by age cohorts. Kohut also founded the opinion research firm, Princeton Survey Research Associates in 1989.

One of Andrew’s most important and unique substantive contributions has been his international polling, which began in 1991 when he and Madeleine Albright conducted surveys in 12 European nations following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming of political independence to Eastern Bloc nations. In 2001 he created the Pew Global Attitudes Project, which has conducted more than 340,000 interviews in 60 countries. The project has chronicled the rise of anti-Americanism, Islamic fundamentalism, reactions to globalization, and democratization across the globe.

In addition to his long service to AAPOR, Andrew was a past president of the National Council on Public Polls.He also served on the Roper Center’s Board of Directors in the 1980s, and in 2000, he won the New York AAPOR Chapter Award for Outstanding Contribution to Opinion Research. He won the 2014 Warren Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research from the Roper Center. He has written extensively about public opinion for leading newspapers and magazines, as well as for scholarly journals. He is the co-author of four books, including, most recently, America Against the World from the Pew Global Attitudes Project work. Kohut received an AB from Seton Hall University and studied graduate sociology at Rutgers University.

You can read Andrew's presidential speech that was printed in Public Opinion Quarterly here.

Sidney Hollander, president of AAPOR 1972-1973, whose influence on standards is still felt in the AAPOR code, died August 24, 2015 in Baltimore at the age of 100.

Mr. Hollander conducted market research on behalf of local and national businesses, including the old National Brewing Co., the Rouse Co. and The Sun. He was a co-author of the 1964 university textbook "Marketing Research."

He was busy during election campaigns. He was retained by candidates and newspapers to show how prospective voters were most likely to cast their ballots.

In the 1978 Democratic primary campaign for Maryland's governor, he was retained by the old News American to chart the election. The field of candidates included acting Gov. Blair Lee III, Baltimore County Executive Ted Venetoulis, Transportation Secretary Harry Hughes and City Council President Walter Orlinsky. Lee, who filled the vacancy after Marvin Mandel left office, led the polls throughout the summer. In August 1978, The Sun endorsed Harry Hughes, who had been running a distant third.

Mr. Hollander showed that after the endorsement, Mr. Hughes' campaign took off. The candidate beat his primary challengers and won the general election against J. Glenn Beall, his Republican opponent.

In a 1979 article titled "On the Strength of a Newspaper Endorsement" in Public Opinion Quarterly, Mr. Hollander wrote, "The newspaper endorsement made Hughes a plausible candidate, and the voters did the rest."

Family members said Mr. Hollander, like his father before him, was an activist advocate of civil rights, civil liberties and peace. They said that while his father was often in the public spotlight, Mr. Hollander worked behind the scenes.

Wolfgang Donsbach

Wolfgang Donsbach, former WAPOR president (1996-97), died on July 26. He was 65.

A colleague of unflagging energy, Wolfgang worked tirelessly on behalf of WAPOR. His legacy includes the elevated reputation of public opinion research around the globe. In a report titled "Who's Afraid of Election Polls?", Wolfgang articulated the normative and empirical arguments for the freedom of preelection polls. He also played a key role in setting up WAPOR's ongoing worldwide study on the freedom to publish opinion polls. And he spearheaded WAPOR's thematic seminars dealing with Quality Criteria in Survey Research.

Another clear legacy of Wolfgang's efforts can be found in the pages of WAPOR's flagship journal, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, with which he was involved for over a quarter-century -- first as manager of the editorial office, then managing editor, then editor, and finally as chair of its International Advisory Board.

Wolfgang's efforts to facilitate high-quality research in public opinion and related fields are reflected in other undertakings. In 2008, he co-edited with Michael Traugott "The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research," which brought together state-of-the-art reviews of public opinion theory and methodology.

Wolfgang's deep commitment to our field - and its social and political significance - is best-reflected in his presidential address for the International Communication Association. In that 2005 address, he noted how "empirical research without normative goals can easily become arbitrary, random, and irrelevant... A common denominator of all endeavors in communication research could be to strive for research that has the potential to serve such general human and democratic values and norms, that is, 'research in the public interest.'"

Having published 18 books and over 200 articles and book chapters, Wolfgang Donsbach was widely read and highly cited for his research on public opinion, media effects, political communication, and journalism. His passing will be felt in multiple communities: at the Dresden University of Technology, where he was a professor of communication; in WAPOR and the numerous other professional associations with which he was actively engaged; and certainly, in the fields of public opinion and communication.

Mervin D. Field

Mervin Field, a member of AAPOR for more than 60 years and a featured AAPOR Heritage Series interviewee, died from natural causes in Marin County, Calif., on June 8. He was 94 years old. Field is survived by a daughter, Nancy, of Oakland; a son, David, of San Rafael; a daughter, Melanie; and a grandson, Dante Lacuadra of Novato.

Field founded Field Research in 1946 and a year later launched the Field Poll, a well-known nonpartisan public opinion news service that used the latest survey methodology to predict California political trends. He was known for adhering to a high degree of ethical standards, transparency and accountability in his work.

According to the Los Angeles Times obituary, Field briefly attended Rutgers University and then the University of Missouri, where he studied journalism. He returned to New Jersey and worked for Gallup until the start of World War II, when he joined the Merchant Marine and served on a transport ship in the South Pacific and European theaters. He left the Merchant Marine in 1945 and started his business in 1946.

Field received the AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement in 1979.

Additional details about Mervin Field can be found in this obituary from the San Francisco Chronicle. AAPOR members may share their remembrances of him on AAPORnet.

Norman H. Nie

AAPOR Lifetime Achievement Award winner and longtime AAPOR supporter, Norman H. Nie, died peacefully surrounded by family and friends at his home in Sun Valley, Idaho on April 2, 2015. He was 72 years old. He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Carol P. Nie, daughters Anne Nie, Lara Slotwiner-Nie , son-in-law Peter Slotwiner-Nie, and granddaughters Sophia Slotwiner-Nie and Helena Slotwiner-Nie. In addition to his beloved family, Nie leaves a legacy of pioneering innovation as an academic social scientist and technology entrepreneur. He was a Professor of Political Science and chair of his department at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1998, and then subsequently at Stanford University, his alma matter. Nie met his wife Carol during their college years at Washington University in St. Louis.

While completing his Ph.D. at Stanford, he collaborated to invent a computer software package to automate the analysis of quantitative data, SPSS. He was the CEO of SPSS between 1975 and 1992 and continued as Chairman of the Board. Nie was honored as the KPMG Technology Entrepreneur in 1986. Throughout his tenure at SPSS, he simultaneously produced academic research in U.S. political behavior and public opinion. Nie authored many articles and award-winning books and was a nationally recognized expert on voting behavior. In 2006, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and 3 years later he was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His scholarly books were honored with the Woodrow Wilson Award (two times) and the Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association. While at Stanford, Nie co-founded the Internet survey research firm Knowledge Networks where he was the Chairman of the Board. He was also the CEO of Revolution Analytics, a commercial software company, and served on the boards of numerous high technology firms.

Nie mentored hundreds of students throughout his career and was often described by colleagues as a force of nature; a man of vast energy and ambition, omnivorous curiosity, deep intellect, immense creativity, and everyday humanity. After work, he could usually be found on the tennis court.

A private burial will be held in St. Louis, and a public memorial is planned for the coming months. Obituary courtesy Wood River Chapel.

Janet Norwood

Janet L. Norwood, who ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics throughout the 1980s and maintained objectivity when politicians wanted her to interpret jobs data in a way that furthered their parties’ agendas, died on March 27 in Austin, Tex. She was 91.

“Simply put, all U.S. policy makers, businesses and families can make better decisions every day because of Janet Norwood’s work at B.L.S.,” Erica L. Groshen, the bureau’s current commissioner, wrote in a statement.

Dr. Norwood ascended through the bureau and was appointed commissioner by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. She was the first woman to hold the position, which she retained until 1991. After retiring, Dr. Norwood joined the Urban Institute, where she published papers and testified before Congress on political issues. She was also the president of the American Statistical Association. The School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham named an annual award for outstanding achievement by a woman in statistical sciences after her.

William “Jay” Wilson, longtime CEO of Roper Starch Worldwide, died on March 22, 2015. Jay’s father, Elmo “Budd” Wilson, helped found AAPOR, serving as its first vice-president and second president. Budd Wilson was also a major figure in the Committee on Standards that wrote the original AAPOR Code of Ethics. Jay provided support to AAPOR over many years through the Roper Center, where he served on the board some 20 years.

2014

Philip Converse

The field of public opinion lost one of its founders, Philip Converse, died on December 30, 2014. Philip was an American political scientist, past AAPOR member, professor emeritus in political science at the University of Michigan and a seminal figure in the field. His article "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" and held that public opinion tended to be inconsistent across issues, unstable over time, and had little understanding of ideology. He co-wrote The American Voter, an instrumental work of political science using data from National Election Studies, a set of important surveys of American public opinion carried out by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center and the Center for Political Studies. He was honored by AAPOR with its highest award, the AAPOR Award, in 1986 for his lifetime contributions to the field, as well as to social science generally.

Michael J. Mokrzycki

Michael J. Mokrzycki died unexpectedly at his home in West Newbury on December 19, 2014, after living life as fully as anyone could in 52 years. He was the loving husband of Jill Gambon, with whom he shared 21 years of marriage, and the devoted father of Brady and Connor Mokrzycki.

In his 52 years, Mike engaged fully with the world; his natural curiosity about nearly anything led him to the perfect career as an award-winning news reporter and editor for the Associated Press for a quarter-century. Mike was born on November 11, 1962, the only child of the late Walter and Frances (Koscielny) Mokrzycki, and was raised in the Maspeth section of Queens in New York City. His upbringing gave him the particular intensity common to the native New Yorker, which manifested itself chiefly in a lifelong passion for news of all sorts (and a collection of historic newspapers to match). He graduated from Holy Cross High School in Queens and Boston University, where he served as editor-in-chief of the independent campus newspaper, the Daily Free Press (and where he met his future wife). He later studied survey research at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. He joined the staff of the Associated Press in 1985 working in the AP's New England bureau in Maine and New Hampshire. He distinguished himself with coverage of national politics. From there, he joined the AP's general desk in New York as a reporter and editor, before joining the AP's election polling team. He was the founding director of the AP Polling Unit, where he set and enforced standards for coverage of election surveys.

In 2009, he established Mokrzycki Survey Research Services, an independent opinion research consultancy where his clients included NBC News, Pew Research Center, Harvard University School of Public Health, ABC News and the Washington Post. He co-authored several papers on opinion research analysis. He was an active member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, where he was elected to the executive council and worked to preserve the history of survey research. For the past four years he was a consultant to NBC News, where he most recently served as manager of election polling for the November 2014 midterm elections.

Anyone who knew Mike was struck by the full attention he brought to his many passions. A necessarily incomplete list of Mike's interests includes barbecuing (with real wood in a double-chambered smoker, never gas), extreme weather (one of his proudest journalism accomplishments was a 1995 interview with Ted Fujita, creator of the measurement scale for tornadoes), the different varieties of kielbasa, computing as far back as his early adoption of online culture in the late 1980s, and music of all sorts. His long interest in the Grateful Dead included attendance at 59 shows as a fan and taper (he had the ticket stubs to prove it). His move to New England was accompanied by a conversion from the Yankees to the Red Sox, and he gleefully celebrated the world titles of 2004, 2007 and 2013 alongside all of New England. Mike lived for the outdoor pursuits of fishing and skiing. His passion for salt-water fishing, especially in the waters off Plum Island, extended to ownership of the Web domain stripedbass.com, and he was justly proud of the "earned turns" pursuit of walking up ski hills to take his runs.

Mike's greatest adventure, however, was his life with his wife and soulmate and their two sons. As an only child, Mike particularly relished joining the extended Gambon clan as the large family he had never had. He joyfully hosted many family get-togethers where great food and conversation flowed in equal measure. After settling in West Newbury in 2000, Mike became involved in open space preservation efforts. His idea of a perfect day revolved around anything he could do with his boys, whether that was a powder day at Mad River Glen in Vermont, where he was a shareholder, a night applying the live recording skills he honed at Grateful Dead shows to Connor's musical performances, or jumping on Brady’s suggestion to organize a family vacation to Dublin to see Arcade Fire. Mike was especially proud this year of both of his sons joining the Pingree School Ski Team.

In addition to his wife and sons and his oft-photographed Wheaten terrier mix dog Teddy, Mike is survived by his loving family: Andy Gambon and Karen Haggerty (Chelmsford), Mary Gambon (Lowell), Donna Gambon (Chelmsford), and Chris and Susan Gambon of Chelmsford; two nephews, Chris Gambon (Lowell) and Ryan Haggerty (Chelmsford) and his godfather, John Hupalo (Orland Park, IL) as well as many cousins and an international community of friends who will struggle to understand his premature passing, but who will always marvel at and celebrate his intense zest for living.

Photo/article credit: Blake Funeral Home, Book of Memories

Sidney Kraus

Dr. Sidney Kraus died in November, 2014. Dr. Kraus was a professor of communications at Cleveland State University. He was a leading expert on televised presidential debates, and served as media and television advisor to governors, senators, and other candidates for public office. Dr. Kraus was a long time member of AAPOR for more than 40 years.

Michel Rochon

Michel Rochon, founder of ASDE, died October 14, 2014. Michel founded ASDE Survey Sampler, a privately owned Canadian company, in 1994 after a successful career in politics, education and management.

Michel Rochon eased into retirement by 2011 and continued in the role of honorary Chairman of the board of directors of ASDE.

He was a devoted member of AAPOR, MRA and MRIA among other associations, and contributor to articles and commentary. Michel was a leader and advocate for change; he supported more transparency, discussing methodologies and the need to respect the respondents; before there was talk of a DNC list he instituted one for our industry. Michel Rochon instilled in us the determination to deliver quality work, utmost service priority and undisputed honesty. We count ourselves among the very lucky ones to have known him. To sit and have a conversation with Michel was exciting, challenging and enlightening. He believed in people young and old.

Dotty Lynch

Dorothea Jean Lynch, the first woman to be chief polltaker for a presidential campaign and one of the first to recognize the potential benefit of developing campaign themes aimed specifically at winning women’s votes, died on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014, in Washington. She was 69.

Per the New York Times: “Ms. Lynch’s career spanned dozens of election campaigns between 1972 and 2012 and included stints at both ends of the political campaign bus. She was a consultant to the presidential campaigns of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Edward M. Kennedy and Walter Mondale, and the political editor who designed independent campaign polls and interpreted their results (off camera) for Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl and Bob Schieffer at CBS News, where she worked from 1985 to 2005. For Mr. Hart, who appointed her as his chief pollster at the start of his 1984 bid for the Democratic nomination, Ms. Lynch devised what came to be known as the first national political campaign with its own ‘women’s strategy.’”

In her vast career, she also ran her own polling consultancy, Lynch Research, and briefly served as polling director for the Democratic National Committee.

“Dotty was a wonderful person. The first woman to go into hardball politics. And she never hesitated to help other women in the field. She supported and gave me at advice at a critical time when I was scared to death to start my own business,” said colleague Celinda Lake.

Photo credit Jeff Watts/American University

2013

Martin Plissner

Martin Plissner, the former executive political director of CBS News who helped shape campaign coverage viewed by millions of Americans for more than three decades, died Feb. 6 at the Washington Home hospice in Washington, DC of lung cancer. He was 87.

He defended the use of exit polls and the media’s attention to what is sometimes called horse-race politics — the who’s-up-and-who’s-down reporting often derided by critics of modern journalism. Read more here.

Jack Honomichl

A well-known name in the market research industry, Jack Honomichl, 85, died on Sunday, December 8, 2013, in Barrington, Illinois. For many in CASRO and the research industry, the name “Jack Honomichl” has been synonymous with market research for over 40 years. As a market researcher and journalist, Jack has been a part of and a chronicler of the ups and downs and remarkable changes in the research industry since the 1970s. Jack and CASRO go back a long way – in fact, Jack Honomichl knew about CASRO when it was still just an idea in the minds of a few research company leaders. Since CASRO’s formation in 1975, Jack has applauded our success in bringing research businesses together and creating a mandatory Code of Standards, but he has also challenged our members and the association to grow, innovate, and adapt to industry changes.

In the 1980s, Jack asked CASRO to contribute to his annual listing of the “Top 20” – now, “Top 50” – U.S. Research Companies, which was then published by Advertising Age. Each year since that time, CASRO has provided an estimate of total revenues of the remaining CASRO members not included among Honomichl’s list of largest companies. Now, the list is published by Marketing News and Inside Research, under the authorship of Jack’s longtime friend and colleague, Larry Gold. CASRO is proud to continue to contribute to the annual “Honomichl Top 50.”

In 2011 with Larry’s help, CASRO was able to surprise Jack by honoring him—with his family present—with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Larry has written a wonderful tribute to and celebration of Jack’s contributions and lasting impact on the research industry. Read it here.

Elizabeth (Liz) Hoover

Elizabeth (Liz) Hoover, research psychologist at the U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), died October 8, 2013 in Washington, DC after a short battle with lung cancer at the age of 64.

Liz first joined ARI as a research fellow in 1990, when she was working on her Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology at the University of Maryland. After earning her doctorate in 1995, she worked at Fu Associates, the University of Maryland, and the Defense Manpower Data Center before returning to ARI in 2010.

Liz was known for her soft heart and her hard work. She regularly drove 30 miles from home to work, even on days she had received chemotherapy and/or radiation. As recently as September 27, as the forthcoming partial government shutdown raised the possibility she would soon be furloughed, Liz needed encouragement to leave the office on time.

Liz is survived by her stepmother, Clare, of Washington, DC, and her brother, Morgan, of Silver Spring, MD.

Larry Hugick

Longtime AAPOR member Larry Hugick died suddenly and unexpectedly on September 22, 2013. Larry was Chairman of PSRAI, which he joined in 1993 after having started his career at Gallup.

As a nationally recognized expert in public opinion and election polling he made continuous and enduring contributions to our field of study. All of us who have worked with Larry will remember him not just for his professional accomplishments, but for his decency and thoughtfulness as well. Our wishes for comfort go out to Larry's wife, Chris, and sons, and all his colleagues at PSRA and in the general survey research community.

Fred H. Goldner

Fred H. Goldner, 86, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queens College, CUNY, died August 19, 2013, after a three-year tourist visit to cancer country without a return visa. Born in New Haven, CT, he had a long and varied career, going back and forth between academia and the public and private corporate world, which included serving both as Chief of Staff of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and as an Executive Consultant with an emergent HMO- Sanus- and its national successor NYLCare.

His most notable scholarly contributions included: the development of the concept of Pronoia (the delusional opposite of Paranoia); the delineation of power relations within organizations; pointing out the necessity of following the flow of money through an organization in order to understand organizational processes; calling attention to managerial demotion; developing the concept of organizational cynical knowledge; studying the effects of belief systems within organizations; identifying correlations between managerial perspectives and future success or failure; discerning, by the analysis of survey data, the startling differences between the belief systems of older and younger priests in the late ‘60s. He served in the U.S. Navy 1944-46 and taught at Columbia Graduate School of Business 1964-70.

He was a member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) for more than 50 years, honored twice as nominee for president and serving on the Council and as Conference Chair in 1981. He started competitive swimming for the first time at 75 and placed in the top 10 nationally 76 times. During the last decade, he was an advisor to the Board of the Lay Center of Foyer Unitas in Rome. He leaves his brother Merwin; his daughter Saren; his son Paul; June, his ex-wife but present companion; and Joseph Lynaugh, his intellectual colleague and close friend of 45 years.

Rev. Andrew Greeley

The Rev. Andrew Greeley, the outspoken Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist known for his deeply researched academic appraisals and sometimes scathing critiques of his church, died Wednesday night, several years after fracturing his skull in a freakish fall. He was 85.

"My privilege was working with Andy for about a year back in the late 1990s with Norm Bradburn on a grant proposal that never got funded -- looking at the transitions into and out of Catholicism among Latinos over time... It was an amazing experience working with such great minds (both Norm & Andy!)... Too bad it never got funded despite our best efforts. Perhaps Andy was ahead of his time!" said Rob Santos, AAPOR President, 2013-2014.

Robin Bebel

Robin Bebel, Assistant Director of the UVa Center for Research, died on Sunday, April 21. She suffered a severe heart attack on Friday morning, from which she never recovered. Her husband Dennis and her grown children, Nick and Maggie, were with her at the end.

Before joining the staff at CSR eight years ago, Robin was a key staff member at the Northern Illinois University Public Opinion Laboratory. We at CSR are feeling her absence more than we can say. We had worked on countless projects together and cheered her on in her heroic recovery from a severe stroke that she suffered five years ago. She had been planning to attend IFDTC in Providence. Our profession has lost one of its truly selfless contributors.

Kenneth P. Adler

Kenneth Adler, long time member of AAPOR and founder of Adler Opinion Research, died on April 17, 2013. Beloved husband of the late Alice Cecelia Adler; devoted father of Marc David Adler of Scotland, Steven and daughter-in-law Lisa Adler of Vermont, Aviva Adler of Israel, and Debbie Adler of Maryland; grandfather of Benjamin Adler of Montreal and Jacob Adler of Vermont.

Carol Hirschon Weiss

Carol Hirschon Weiss died on January 8, 2013. She was professor emerita at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and a long-time Research Associate at the Bureau of App[lied Social Research at Columbia. There she got her Ph.D in 1977, submitting in lieu of the usual dissertation her best-selling book, Evaluation Research: Methods for Assessing Program Effectiveness (1972) which generations of evaluation researchers have learned from. The latest version, grown to over 300 pages, is Evaluation: Methods For Studying Programs and Policies (1998.)

After getting her BA at Cornell in 1947 and an MA in political science at Columbia in 1949, she and her husband began raising three children. By the 1960's she was serving as a consultant for the federal program on juvenile delinquency, an early part of the War on Poverty, and was research director for ACT, one of Harlem's community action programs. This brought her into contact with poverty researchers at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia, which she joined and carried out research for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare on problems of data collection from low-income populations and methods of research on community action agencies.Out of this came her brief but influential 1972 book on evaluation research, in which she developed the idea that social action programs have an explicit or implicit set of theories about the causes of problems and the way interventions affect them, which need to be tested in evaluation research, along with the simple question of "Did the program work?".

She joined Paul Lazarsfeld's last major project, the study of the influence of social research on policy, and carried out with Michael Bucuvalas an ingenious survey experiment in which a sample of policy makers in the mental health field were asked to rate actual research papers, presented as two-page abstracts, as to their possible usefulness to their programs, as well as rating a set of features of the research as presented in the abstract. This demonstrated different ways which policy administrators used research and led to her book on Social Science Research and Decision-Making (1980). She also worked on the Bureau's elite survey of over 500 leaders of a variety of governmental and private institutions, and produced a POQ paper on "What America's leaders read" (1974), which was the Bureau's most-requested reprint, especially by the New York Times.

Moving the the Harvard Graduate School of Education she brought her skills at evaluation research and studying how research influenced (or failed to influence) policy to America's biggest and oldest "social program," public education, teaching educational researchers both the techniques of "effects research" and how to make the results relevant to policy makers. In 1992 she published "Organizations for Policy Analysis: Helping Governments Think, which summed up what she had learned from her research and practice.

She was a great colleague and a great teacher, but could joke about herself. She once told me about her trip to Paris as a student, on which she noticed on the subway map the Place de la Bastille. She decided she had to see the famous prison, and took the train there. Coming up in the Place, she immediately recalled that the whole building had been torn down stone by stone by the revolutionaries.

2012

Alice Padawer-Singer

Alice Padawer-Singer died peacefully in her sleep Dec. 6 at St. Luke's Hospital in New York. She was two weeks shy of her 90th birthday. Dr. Padawer-Singer was a remarkable woman.

Professor of Psychology and the originator of the Science of Jury Selection, she maintained throughout her life an abiding passion for justice resulting in her concentrating her professional efforts in the area of Free Press - Fair Trial Studies. She was the first person to conduct truly empirical studies of how six versus twelve person juries under unanimous and non-unanimous conditions came to decisions. These studies were conducted in Queens Supreme Court using an actual trial and actual jurors chosen by Voir Dire from the general jury pool. A native of France, Alice was forced to flee from her country by the Nazi invasion in 1940. Escaping with her father Isaac Padawer and her mother Rosa Padawer, she went from Vichy, France to Casablanca, Martinique (where she was interned by the Vichy government) and Cuba before gaining admission to the United States.

A true woman of valor and daughter of Israel, she is survived by her son, Andrew N. Singer; her daughter, Rickie Peaslee-Singer; her sister, Simone Blum; three grandchildren Isabel Singer, Alex Peaslee and Lauren Peaslee; and loving nieces, nephews and cousins too numerous to mention.

Dr. Seymour Lieberman

Dr. Seymour Lieberman, known to all as Sy, died on October 1st, 2012, after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. Dr. Lieberman received his undergraduate degree at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Lieberman started his career at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan where he served as Senior Study Director in the Human Relations Program and conducted studies on the structure and functioning of large organizations. Among the areas of expertise he developed were measuring employee morale, productivity, absenteeism, turnover, supervisory practices and union-management relations in a variety of industrial, governmental and voluntary institutions.

In 1956, Dr. Lieberman joined the Kenyon and Eckhardt advertising agency as a Market Research Group Head. In this role he developed innovative research approaches in communication and consumer behavior using public opinion research. He quickly rose to Vice President and Director of Research, was selected to serve on the agency’s Board of Directors and s as a member of the agency’s Marketing Plans Board and Creative Review Board.

Under his aegis, the Kenyon and Eckhardt research department became known as one of the most innovative in the industry. The department developed techniques in measuring advertising and communication effectiveness and consumer attitude segmentation using attitudes and social factors in understanding consumer behavior. It also had its own survey division. Sy ran the department in a way that fostered openness and creativity and many of the members of his department went on from his mentorship to later fame in the marketing, advertising and public opinion research fields.

In 1966, Dr. Lieberman, at heart a true entrepreneur, and a man who never saw obstacles, only challenges and opportunities, left K&E to form Lieberman Research, Inc., to conduct studies in the fields of public opinion , market and communications research. Knowing that key employees might also feel the tug of entrepreneurism, he encouraged and supported them in the formation of independent branches of the company in Los Angeles and Great Neck, and nurtured their growth to among the largest and most innovative firms in the industry until his retirement from active involvement in the company in 1993.

At that time, Dr. Lieberman found that he was being called on to conduct research for legal issues. In 1993, Dr. Lieberman formed The Epsilon Group Inc., a market research consulting organization to law firms, specializing in n intellectual property issues..

Dr. Lieberman maintained a lifelong connection with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, establishing a fellowship and consulting with them on curriculum and other issues. He has lectured on survey research methods at the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Vanderbilt University, the Baruch School of the City University of New York, the University of California, and Fairleigh-Dickinson, among others.

Dr. Lieberman spent more than 30 years as a Research Consultant for the American Cancer Society, and has also consulted for the American Lung Association, the President’s Committee for Health Education, the United Jewish Appeal, the Presbyterian Church, the New York City Youth Board, and Major League Baseball.

Sy was a member of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the American Marketing Association, the Advertising Research Foundation, and the Market Research Council.

He leaves behind a loving family including his wife Marilyn Watts Lieberman, his sons Joshua and Mark, his stepdaughter Fern Watts and 5 grandchildren. He is also being mourned by many of his former employees, colleagues and clients all of whom had the privilege to share Sy’s his warmth, creativity and mentoring nature which enriched their lives and careers.

Janet A. Harkness

Janet Harkness died on Memorial Day (May 28, 2012) in Germany at age 63. Harkness was the Director of the Survey Research and Methodology graduate program and Gallup Research Center, and holder of the Donald and Shirley Clifton Chair in Survey Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was the founder and Chair of the Organizing Committee on the International Workshop on Comparative Survey Design and Implementation (CSDI). Her many contributions to cross-national and cross-cultural survey research included service as Head of the International Social Survey Programme’s Methodology Committee (1997-2008), board member of the National Science Foundation’s (USA) Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences Advisory Board (2008-present), board member of the Deutsches Jugendinstitut (Germany) Advisory Board (2009-present), Co-initiator of the Cross-Cultural Survey Guidelines Initiative, Chair of the Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Survey Methods in Multicultural, Multinational and Multiregional Contexts (3MC, Berlin 2008), and member of the European Social Survey’s (ESS) Central Coordinating Team. The ESS was awarded the European Union’s top annual science award, the Descartes Prize, in 2005. She has been a member of WAPOR since 2009.

W. Philips Davison, age 93, longtime resident of Princeton, N.J. died Wednesday, May 16 in Washington, D.C. Mr. Davison was a Princeton University graduate, and a longtime former member of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, was in the OSS in WWII, and formerly a member of the RAND Corporation, a prominent professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, a founder, and the former President and editor of the magazine of the American Society of Public Opinion Research. He was the author of many books. His loving survivors include his wife Emma- Rose Martin; his son Stowe of College Park, M.D.; his daughter Holly Wolf of Fairport, N.Y.; one grandson, and two great-grandsons.

E. Richard (“Rick”) Brown

Nearly a year ago (April 20, 2012), Dr. E. Richard (“Rick”) Brown died. I am not sure if Rick was ever an AAPOR member, but he was the driving force that developed the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), the nation’s largest state health survey, which employs many AAPOR members (both here at UCLA and at our data collection contractor, Westat).

2011

Sir Roger Jowell
March 26, 1942 – December 25, 2011

Sir Roger Jowell died December 25, 2011 in London at age 69. Jowell was winner of the WAPOR Helen Dinerman Award for career contributions to innovative research and survey research methodology in 2005. His many contributions to the social sciences and survey research include co-founding with Gerald Hoinville Social and Community Planning research (now the National Centre for Social Research) in 1969, starting the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) in 1983, co-directing the British Election Studies from 1983 to 2000, co-founding the International Social Survey Programme in 1984, and organizing the European Social Survey (ESS) which had its first round in 2002/2003. The ESS was awarded the European Union’s top annual science award, the Descartes Prize, in 2005. In 2008, Jowell was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his leadership in the social sciences.

Besides his unparalleled institution-building achievements, Jowell made major contributions to the scholarly literature including How Britain Votes (1985) and The Rise of New Labour (2001) with A.F. Heath and John Curtice, Measuring Attitudes Cross-Nationally (2007) with Caroline Roberts, Rory Fitzgerald, and Gillian Eva, Attitude Measurement (2008) with Caroline Roberts, and many of the annual volumes of the BSAS.

As his colleague Rory Fitzgerald, Deputy Director of the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, City University London, noted, Jowell “made an exceptional contribution to social sciences in the UK and across the world. His firm belief in the need for methodological rigour has helped ensure there is a school within public opinion research that is scientifically driven.”

Mary Nichols Arragon Spaeth
January 30, 1932 – November 22, 2011

Mary Nichols Arragon Spaeth, 79, died Nov. 22 at her home in Corvallis.

She was born on Jan. 30, 1932, in Portland to Professor Reginald F. Arragon and Gertrude Nichols Arragon. Except for a year in England, she spent her childhood years in Portland, attending the Hillside School and graduating from the Catlin School in 1949. She graduated from Reed College in 1953. It was while at Reed that she met her future husband, Joe L. Spaeth.

She got her master's degree in library science from Columbia University, New York City, in 1954. She returned to Portland, where she and Joe, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, were married on Aug. 28, 1954, in the Reed College Chapel after a three-year engagement.

While Joe continued his studies, Mary worked in the library of the Chicago Historical Society until the birth of their first son, Donald, in December 1956, followed by Alan in March 1960. Mary remained a stay-at-home mother until 1967, when she became editorial director at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

In 1971, she and Joe moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was editor and librarian (with a variety of titles) in the Survey Research Laboratory until her retirement in February 1992. When she retired, she became an honorary life member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research.

After Joe retired the following year, they moved back to the Pacific Northwest, and settled in Corvallis. They became avid golfers, playing not only at the Corvallis Country Club but at courses during their travels throughout the West.

Mary is survived by Joe, her husband of 57 years; and by sons Donald (Tamasine) of Glasgow, Scotland, and Alan (Margaret Danahy) of Beaverton.

George Gallup Jr.
April 9, 1930 – November 23, 2011

George Gallup Jr, who helped lead the public opinion polling firm founded by his father until his retirement in 2004, has died of cancer at the age of 81.

George Horace Gallup III was born on April 9, 1930 in Evanston, IL, five years before his father founded the business.

After graduating with a degree in religion in 1953, he considered becoming an Episcopal priest, but after two years working with young people at an African-American church in Galveston, Texas, he chose to join his older brother Alec at the family company.

George Jr was involved in traditional political polls, but expanded the firm’s services into religious surveys, when he became known as one of the first pollsters to ask questions about organized religion and religious teachings and practice in the US. In 1977, he helped found the Princeton Religion Research Center, which produced reports on the effect of religious belief on health, trends in church attendance, and religion and young people.

He remained with the family business for half a century; latterly as Chairman and corporate spokesman while his brother served as co-Chairman. Their father died in 1984, and four years later the family sold their stake in the business to Nebraska-based Selection Research (SRI).

After stepping down from his role in 2004, George Jr set up nonprofit organization the George H. Gallup Foundation, through which he and his wife Kingsley organized an annual ‘Ideas for Progress’ seminar, which sought solutions to social problems identified by the polls.

He also published books on American religion and spirituality, and had recently published ‘The Gallup Guide: Reality Check for Twenty First Century Churches’.

Frank Newport, Gallup’s Editor in Chief said of him: ‘George had this unusual combination of training at his father's knee in polling, the scientific ascertainment of public opinions, and also a passion for religion.’

George Jr’s wife died in 2007, and his brother Alec in 2009. He is survived by his daughters Alison and Kingsley, son George IV, sister Julia Gallup Laughlin, and two grandchildren.

After a brave fight for his life, Norval lost his two and a half year battle with Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) on February 15, 2011. He died peacefully at Seton Medical Center Williamson surrounded by his loved ones.

Born on August 13, 1933, at the Glenn Ranch in Lea County, New Mexico, Norval attended school in Tatum, New Mexico and received a B.A. in Social Science from New Mexico State University. After serving in the Army for four years, Norval earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at Miami University in Ohio and University of Illinois at Urbana until 1964. That year he returned to teach in the Sociology Department at UT Austin where he remained on the faculty until his retirement in January 2011.

Norval was the Ashbel Smith Professor, University of Texas since 1984 and Stiles Professor in American Studies, University of Texas since 1991. Norval was a nationally and internationally recognized sociologist, and his passing is a loss to the sociology research community. He had a distinguished career as a UT scholar and professor and excelled at his meticulous research.

He was known for his kind, considerate, and fair manner; his devotion to his students; and his prolific publications. Norval was devoted to his scholarly life and his sociological research, which he loved to do and did so well. Throughout his career Norval had several research interests in which he distinguished himself, including social and cultural change, methods and survey data analysis, aging and the life cycle and ending with a focus on family and family policy research.

Norval was the editor of Contemporary Sociology, 1978-1980, and the Journal of Family Issues, 1985-1989. Additionally, he served on the editorial boards of numerous other academic journals including; Contemporary Sociology, Journal of Family Issues, Social Science Quarterly, Demography, Public Opinion Quarterly, American Sociological Association Rose Monograph Series, Social Indicators Research, American Sociologist, Social Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Family Issues, and Social Science Research.

During his long career Norval was awarded numerous awards including: the Distinguished Alumnus Award, New Mexico State University, 1988; the Outstanding Graduate Teacher Award, University of Texas at Austin, 1993; Silver Spurs Centennial Teaching Fellowship, an undergraduate teaching award, 2003; the Texas Council on Family Relations 2004 Moore-Bowman Award for outstanding achievement in the field of family relations; and the Warren E. Miller Award for Meritorious Service to the Social Sciences granted by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2007.

Norval was preceded in death by his parents, William Noah Glenn and Edna Cochrain Glenn; sister, Dennis LaRue Glenn Fullingim; and nephew, Peyton Fullingim. He is survived by his wife and step-son, Grace G. Glenn and Erik A. Schmitt, both of Austin, brother-in-law, J. Worth Fullingim of Lubbock; and numerous cousins.

The family wishes to thank the staff and nurses at Texas Oncology Seton Williamson and Seton Medical Center Williamson for the warm and loving care they provided Norval throughout his illness. Also, the family thanks Dr. David George for the excellent care that he provided and the kindness, understanding, and compassion that he always extended to Norval.

Norval's life was extended as a result of the numerous units of blood and platelets that he received throughout his illness. Therefore, the family requests donations of blood or platelets be made in remembrance of Norval, in lieu of floral remembrances. Norval's ashes will be laid to rest at the Glenn Ranch in Lea County, New Mexico.

Robert G. Mason
July 4, 1927 – Feb. 4, 2011

Corvallis native Robert G. Mason, emeritus professor of statistics at Oregon State University, died of natural causes Feb. 4, 2011, at Corvallis Caring Place. He was 83.

He was born July 4, 1927, to Earl G. and Gladys Weatherspoon Mason at Good Samaritan Hospital, and attended Harding Elementary School, the local middle school at what is now Central Park, and Corvallis High School.

For two summers while in high school, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service, primarily as compassman and lookout in the Foley Ridge area of the Willamette National Forest. The nation was at war, and available able-bodied men were scarce.

CHS allowed 17-year-olds the option of leaving high school early for enlistment or higher education, and Bob chose Oregon State College (now OSU). When he turned 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving with Headquarters Company of the 1067th Engineers in the occupation of Japan, stationed at Kyoto. His tour of duty, which ended with an eye injury, is chronicled in his 2007 memoir "My Stretch in the Service."

After recovering, Bob resumed his studies at OSC, working in the newsroom of the Barometer, where he noticed a quiet, tall girl his friends said he should get to know. They dated; when Suzanne Cockeram transferred to the University of Oregon to pursue her journalism degree, Bob bought what he would later call "that miserable Chev" so he could see her on weekends.

When Bob finished his bachelor's degree in agriculture and Sue likewise graduated, they were married Jan. 14, 1951, in Yoncalla, leaving immediately for Madison, Wis., where Bob earned a master's degree in agricultural journalism, and then to Ames, Iowa, where he worked in ag extension information.

In 1953, Bob was named ag experiment station editor at OSC, and they returned to Corvallis, where, among his publications, Bob launched the quarterly magazine Oregon's Agricultural Progress. He later earned a doctorate in communication research at Stanford University, and completed a year's post-doctoral studies in the philosophy of science at Princeton University.

Bob spent the rest of his academic career in the Survey Research Center at OSU, conducting public opinion surveys - including policy-changing studies for the Internal Revenue Service, the American Bar Foundation, and on the state of the City of Corvallis - and writing journal articles and book chapters on survey methodology and the ethics of survey research into his late 70s.

In his middle years, Bob successfully fought a development across the road from his family farm near Jefferson, aided in his 10-year legal battle by 1000 Friends of Oregon. The effort to preserve Hale Butte from subdivision took Bob twice to the Oregon Supreme Court, and cemented the authority of the statewide land-use development code. The lawsuit had national land-use ramifications.

Bob served on the Corvallis Budget Commission and the original and independent Committee for Citizen Involvement, and was until recently active in land-use issues in Benton and Linn counties. His activities in land use included helping found Friends of Linn County and the Goal One Coalition. He was an early and constant force opposing development of northwest Corvallis acreage through a group now known as Friends of Witham Oaks.

Bob's health issues included Alzheimer's disease, which clouded his memory of recent events without robbing him of awareness of his past, his family, friends or his surroundings. Indeed, those who came to know Bob Mason during his months at the Corvallis Caring Place enjoyed a sharp, outgoing and humorous man, rather than the reserved scholar who sometimes walked in such deep concentration past friends and family that he failed to notice their repeated greetings.

He paid attention when it counted, encouraging his daughters in spirited dinner-table debates while pounding in his belief that life was theirs to lead regardless of their gender. Bob's passion for fairness and ethics led him to create the Mason Prize for Integrity and Moral Courage, an award to be given through the Spring Creek Project of OSU as it might be occasionally earned by academicians resisting pressure to stifle their scientific discoveries.

Bob and Sue just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. Bob is also survived by his daughters, Nancy Mason Vandell of San Ramon, Calif., and Laurie Mason of Corvallis; and son-in-law Clark Vandell and grandson Perry Robert Vandell, also of San Ramon. He was predeceased last July by his brother, Roger Mason, his only sibling.